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**sharon sanders** · November 30, 2020, 09:14 AM

Yesterday, 05:06 PM
I want to make a comment here about something I saw being talked about. There is speculation that the China government is pushing the "COVID-19 found on imported frozen food packaging" agenda to blame other countries for being the origin of the disease. I think not. The China government did not start mentioning the "frozen" mantra until June:

China - Beijing coronavirus outbreak, frozen food blamed - June 12, 2020+ - cases have spread to 4 provinces

If frozen food packaging was the scapegoat for the origin of COVID-19 then the China government would have started blaming "frozen" much earlier. Like January 1, 2020.

I think these "frozen" discoveries are mostly new outbreaks that they are blaming on frozen imports as an excuse since they are doing such a great job on controlling COVID-19 in a population of 1.4 billion people. Yup. Since the large outbreaks in the spring, the government usually reports that the new outbreaks are all caused by imported people or imported frozen food packaging - with very few exceptions.

Others think that China is blaming "frozen" imports to play games with international trading partners. I also think not. China needs the food.

1 comment

#283.1
sharon sanders commented
Yesterday, 07:49 PM
I want to clarify that I do not know if SARS-CoV-2 can survive frozen on packaging with enough strength to infect people. The numerous China outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 cited as originating from frozen packaging on imported goods is not generally accepted. It is, however, very interesting. I am following these instances because I think it is a sign of something - I am just not sure of what....

-------------------------------------------------

Also, blaming "frozen" for most all of the newer COVID-19 coronavirus cases speaks to the China government's knowledge of exactly how long a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle can last when frozen. And how much frozen virus it takes to infect a human either from touch or breathing the air around a frozen package, and, and, and...all of this knowledge coming from previous experiences from freezing this virus. This reliance on "frozen" actually supports the theory that a lab escape from a China lab in Wuhan is responsible for the pandemic.

No other country in the world has claimed that frozen packaging has caused a human COVID-19 case - maybe because they don't know it can.

Please see:

China - Ministry of Transport implements guidelines for handling refrigerated and frozen shipments - November 27, 2020

**bertrand789** · November 30, 2020, 09:27 AM

Les chinois , doivent avoir des d?fauts , mais ils ont aussi, bien des qualit?s . Ils ont regard?, bien des choses et dans le d?tail, c'est s?r.

Mais leur communication r?v?le, aux yeux form?s, plus que ce qu'ils veulent ...

**sharon sanders** · December 2, 2020, 03:14 PM

China - The Wuhan files: Leaked documents reveal China's mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19 - November 30, 2020

**sharon sanders** · December 19, 2020, 10:04 AM

Leaked Documents Show How China’s Army of Paid Internet Trolls Helped Censor the Coronavirus

As the coronavirus spread in China, the government stage-managed what appeared on the domestic internet to make the virus look less severe and the authorities more capable, according to thousands of leaked directives and other files.

by Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica

Dec. 19, 5 a.m. EST

snip

The CAC’s coronavirus controls began in the first week of January. An agency directive ordered news websites to use only government-published material and not to draw any parallels with the deadly SARS outbreak in China and elsewhere that began in 2002, even as the World Health Organization was noting the similarities.

At the start of February, a high-level meeting led by Xi called for tighter management of digital media, and the CAC’s offices across the country swung into action. A directive in Zhejiang Province, whose capital is Hangzhou, said the agency should not only control the message within China, but also seek to “actively influence international opinion.”

Agency workers began receiving links to virus-related articles that they were to promote on local news aggregators and social media. Directives specified which links should be featured on news sites’ home screens, how many hours they should remain online and even which headlines should appear in boldface.

more..

https://www.propublica.org/article/l...he-coronavirus

**sharon sanders** · December 30, 2020, 02:20 PM

bump this thread on the sad anniversary of the first news about the emerging pandemic.....

**Mary Wilson** · December 30, 2020, 11:34 PM

China clamps down in hidden hunt for coronavirus origins

Top Chinese officials quietly ordered strict controls on all COVID-19 research in the country, internal documents obtained by The AP show, cloaking the search for the origins of the virus in secrecy

Via AP news wire 22 hours ago

... The area is of intense scientific interest because it may hold clues to the origins of the coronavirus that has killed more than 1.7 million people worldwide. Yet for scientists and journalists, it has become a black hole of no information because of political sensitivity and secrecy.

A bat research team visiting recently managed to take samples but had them confiscated, two people familiar with the matter said. Specialists in coronaviruses have been ordered not to speak to the press. And a team of Associated Press journalists was tailed by plainclothes police in multiple cars who blocked access to roads and sites in late November.

More than a year since the first known person was infected with the coronavirus, an AP investigation shows the Chinese government is strictly controlling all research into its origins, clamping down on some while actively promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside China.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/c...box=1609372267

**bertrand789** · December 31, 2020, 03:52 PM

Those who read this forum know where to look. The worst part is I'm sure the job is done.

This is not the first time that a pathogen has emerged from a farm ...

When the Chinese vets get right and do their job and publish, this record will be enlightened.

That bodies like the Eco Health alliance are funded, that doesn't bother me. The only thing is that they must never pretend to be what they are not ...

**sharon sanders** · January 3, 2021, 12:59 PM

China lab leak is the 'most credible' source of the coronavirus outbreak, says top US government official, amid bombshell claims Wuhan scientist has turned whistleblower

Donald Trump's Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger spoke
Mr Pottinger told politicians leak is emerging as 'most credible source' of virus
He claimed the pathogen may have escaped through a 'leak or an accident'

By Abul Taher, Security Correspondent For The Mail On Sunday

Published: 17:06 EST, 2 January 2021 | Updated: 07:06 EST, 3 January 2021

snip

'MPs around the world have a moral role to play in exposing the WHO investigation as a Potemkin exercise,' Mr Pottinger told the parliamentarians, in reference to the fake villages created in the Crimea in the 18th Century, intended to convince the visiting Russian Empress Catherine the Great that the region was in good health.

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory Party leader who attended the meeting, said Mr Pottinger's comments represented a 'stiffening' of the US position on the theory that the virus came from a leak at the laboratory, amid reports that the Americans are talking to a whistleblower from the Wuhan institute.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-official.html

**bertrand789** · January 3, 2021, 04:10 PM

On a jamais trouv? la cause de la vache folle et c'?tait au R. U. Alors pourquoi vouloir trouver ?

Ce serait pourtant, tr?s instructif, au moins d'entrevoir, un bout. Mais on le sait d?j?, si l'on se souvient des faits.
Le ridicule sera total, quand ce sera publi?...

**Mary Wilson** · January 3, 2021, 10:41 PM

China voices its version of coronavirus pandemic emergence

21:32, 3 January 2021
Source : 112 Ukraine

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi believes the pandemic was caused by isolated outbreaks of coronavirus in several places around the world.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi outlined Beijing's version of the emergence of coronavirus pandemic, which is to deny that the city of Wuhan was the primary source of the spread of Covid-19. In particular, the head of the PRC Foreign Ministry stated this position in an interview with Xinhua Agency and China Central Television, published on the website of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

https://112.international/politics/china-voices-its-version-of-emergence-of-coronavirus-pandemic-57844.html

**blacknail** · January 4, 2021, 01:10 AM

Originally posted by Mary Wilson View Post

China voices its version of coronavirus pandemic emergence

21:32, 3 January 2021
Source : 112 Ukraine

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi believes the pandemic was caused by isolated outbreaks of coronavirus in several places around the world.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi outlined Beijing's version of the emergence of coronavirus pandemic, which is to deny that the city of Wuhan was the primary source of the spread of Covid-19. In particular, the head of the PRC Foreign Ministry stated this position in an interview with Xinhua Agency and China Central Television, published on the website of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

https://112.international/politics/china-voices-its-version-of-emergence-of-coronavirus-pandemic-57844.html

We would know if that were the case from sequencing global samples from last fall that retrospectively tested positive.

**bertrand789** · January 4, 2021, 03:29 AM

Nous avons couru contre la montre et avons ?t? le premier pays ? signaler des cas au monde. De plus en plus de recherches sugg?rent que la pand?mie a probablement ?t? caus?e par des flamb?es distinctes dans plusieurs endroits du monde. Lorsqu'elle a ?t? touch?e par un coronavirus inconnu, la Chine a pris des mesures imm?diates pour mener une enqu?te ?pid?miologique, identifier l'agent pathog?ne et publier des informations cl?s, notamment le s?quen?age du g?nome du virus. Tout cela a sonn? l'alarme ? travers le monde.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxx...t1844079.shtml

Par application du principe de r?ciprocit?:

- cela signifie que tous les produits congel?s en provenance de Chine maintenant et ? l'avenir doivent faire l'objet d'un examen m?ticuleux, dans un lieu d?di?, avant leur embarquement , ou ?tre interdit ?

- cela signifie aussi que tous les humains en provenance de Chine doivent ?tre isol?s maintenant et ? l'avenir pour une p?riode suffisante pour ?tre s?r ?

Internet et le cloud vont avoir de beaux jours devant eux et le tourisme en Chine va se d?velopper, mais par et pour, les chinois eux m?me .

Vu les propos, il va falloir lister les autres lieux ?

je propose de commencer par le Vietnam, un autre pays mangeur et producteur de rats. Comme ce pays exporte bien des produits congel?s, exemple panga , il va falloir vraiment regarder de pr?t, ou, en attente, les laisser envoyer cela uniquement en Chine .

En gros les certificateurs comme le BRC et L'IFS , que les chinois consid?rent officiellement comme incomp?tent, devrait nous pr?senter les deux nouvelles versions des normes , celle pour la Chine int?rieure, celle pour le reste du monde...

https://certification.afnor.org/qual...groalimentaire

Pour les humains, cela va avec une notion de passeport sanitaire, mais l?, comme il va bien falloir au moins 15 ans pour se mettre d'accord , on est pas pr?t de voir des touristes et ou femmes et ou hommes d'affaire chinois.

Le droit diplomatique va ?tre adapt? ou ?

**Shiloh** · January 4, 2021, 05:41 PM

Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...pe-theory.html

investigations 6:00 A.M.
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?
By Nicholson Baker

I.
Flask Monsters

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare. We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become.

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed ingenious methods of evolutionary acceleration and recombination, and they’ve learned how to trick viruses, coronaviruses in particular, those spiky hairballs of protein we now know so well, into moving quickly from one species of animal to another or from one type of cell culture to another. They’ve made machines that mix and mingle the viral code for bat diseases with the code for human diseases — diseases like SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, for example, which arose in China in 2003, and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, which broke out a decade later and has to do with bats and camels. Some of the experiments — “gain of function” experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature. The term gain of function is itself a euphemism; the Obama White House more accurately described this work as “experiments that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” The virologists who carried out these experiments have accomplished amazing feats of genetic transmutation, no question, and there have been very few publicized accidents over the years. But there have been some...

**Shiloh** · January 5, 2021, 07:44 PM

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...covids-origins

China blocks entry to WHO team studying Covid's origins
Officials say visas not yet approved for World Health Organization delegation due to visit Wuhan
Sarah Boseley Health editor
Tue 5 Jan 2021 20.08 GMT
Last modified on Tue 5 Jan 2021 23.59 GMT

China has blocked the arrival of a team from the World Health Organization investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, claiming that their visas had not yet been approved even as some members of the group were on their way.

The WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, expressed his dismay and said he had called on China to allow the team in. “I’m very disappointed with this news, given that two members have already begun their journeys, and others were not able to travel at the last minute,” he said.

“But I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials. And I have once again made made it clear that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team.”

The WHO has been attempting to send in the team of global experts from a number of countries for some months. It has been talking with Chinese officials since July. Scientists have long said it is essential to find out how the virus jumped species into humans...

**sharon sanders** · January 6, 2021, 04:55 AM

posted in its entirety with permission

hat tip Jason Gale

WHO Issues Rare Rebuke to China for Delaying Virus Origins Trip
2021-01-06 05:00:22.838 GMT

By Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- The World Health Organization expressed
disappointment with China for delaying the travel of experts to
the Asian country to investigate the origin of the virus, in a
rare instance of public criticism from the international
organization.
Chinese officials have not yet finalized permission to
allow WHO-appointed experts to enter the country even as some of
them embarked on travel, said WHO Director-General Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a briefing on Tuesday. The delay comes
despite months of negotiation and planning between Chinese
officials and the 10-member expert team.
“I am very disappointed with this news given that two
members had already begun their journeys and others were not
able to travel at the last minute,” Tedros said. “We are eager
to get the mission underway as soon as possible.”
The delay by Chinese authorities fuels concern that Beijing
is obstructing international efforts to trace the origins of a
pandemic that has now killed over 1.8 million people worldwide.
Stung by criticism that China initially covered up the extent of
the crisis, state media and government figures have been pushing
the possibility that the pathogen did not emerge solely in the
Asian country.
China Making It Harder to Solve the Mystery of Where Covid
Began
Members of the WHO expert team appear to have called off
their travel for now. “No, luckily wasn’t on the way yet,” Dutch
virologist Marion Koopmans said in a Twitter post, in response
to a question on whether she was facing travel obstacles.
Bloomberg Quicktake
@Quicktake
“I’m very disappointed with this news.”

The WHO team investigating #Covid19’s origins has been
temporarily prevented from entering China due to visa issues,
says @DrTedros @WHO. More: trib.al/Jmq5J1y
Sent via SocialFlow.
View original tweet.
The WHO has been criticized for being too deferential to
China through the course of the pandemic, and has been blamed by
other countries for initially downplaying the severity of the
crisis. U.S. President Donald Trump said last year that the
superpower would terminate its relationship with the WHO unless
it “demonstrated independence” from China.
Top Chinese epidemiologist Liang Wannian, who oversaw the
country’s virus response until September last year, told
Bloomberg News in an interview on Tuesday that the WHO’s
investigation would “begin very soon” in China.
The WHO team and experts from China plan to jointly analyze
data and samples taken from the Wuhan wet market where many of
China’s earliest Covid-19 patients appear to have become
infected, he said.
Liang said he has been working with two WHO experts since
July to formulate a plan on how to conduct the tracing work in
China.

--With assistance from Claire Che and Jason Gale.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story:
John Liu in Beijing at jliu42@bloomberg.net;
Dong Lyu in Beijing at dlyu3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Rachel Chang at wchang98@bloomberg.net
Jeff Sutherland

------------------------------------------------------

China response:

TAIPEI — Responding to criticism from the World Health Organization that China had blocked a scheduled mission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, Beijing on Wednesday said the two sides were “still negotiating.”

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular news briefing that the issue of tracing the source of the virus was “very complicated” and arrangements were needed to “ensure the smooth progress” of the team of researchers.

more..

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...ve-updates-us/

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Discussion: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan has been working with bats and coronavirus for many years - DNA manipulations, cloning....

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